I just stumbled across the Vigor 2850 xDSL router from DrayTek, and was impressed by the specification. Features that jump out are:

• VDSL port, so this is a one-box solution for BT Infinity (BT themselves bring two separate boxes)
• IPv6 support integrated.
• 802.11n, also with operation in the 5.8GHz band (much less noisy)
• 802.11e quality-of-service features built-in (assuming your client adapters can do this too)
• USB port, so the device can fail-over to 3G using the ubiquitous 3G dongles

They seem to be targetting the branch office (perhaps home office) user where the customer is willing to invest a bit more in a leading-edge device. This is somewhat expensive right now (around £200), but is a whole different ball game to the commodity £20-40 routers for ADSL. I imagine that there’s a good few years service life in this product.

Link: http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor2850.html

I’ve been reading the new book Alan Turing and His Contemporaries, which has some interesting insights into the first digital computers and the men and women that built them. I won’t go into much of the detail of this book, apart from to say “buy it” if you are interested in early computers. One thing that I found interesting was the discussion of memories based on Mercury delay lines. If you haven’t heard of this, let me describe it briefly: a glass tube (up to perhaps 2m long) is filled with Mercury and this is used to store data bits. How does it do this? Very simply, the bits a converted into physical waves that travel (quite slowly) down the tube. At the other end, the waves hit a transducer (perhaps like a microphone), which converts the impulses back into electricity. The waves can then be reshaped with some electronics and rotated back around to the start again. The result is a column of bits travelling down the tube as waves.

This sounds impractical: for example it’s quite an inconvenient memory, because if we say the “tube capacity” is 1000 bits, then after you push a bit in, you have to wait 1000 bit times until you see that bit again at the receiver. It is a serial-access device for bits. Still it did find its uses in digital computing (and radar), and it’s possible to find scientifc papers going into the 1950s, with researchers increasing the speed and capacity of these systems. Later on came storage devices based on cathode-ray tubes, magnetic drums, ferrite cores and finally of course silicon. Mercury delay-lines did not survive, although it was an appropriate use of technology at the time and many erudite people contributed to their development.

Contrast this with work on information theory and digital communication. The 40’s saw researchers like Claude Shannon creating the theory that underpins the whole of today’s modern communication for wireless, optical and everything multimedia. It touches lossy and losless compression, multipath cellular coverage and many other contemporary concerns.

Much of the technology of digital communications was invented from the 40’s to the 70’s, but had little application back then, as there was no way to build cost-effective electronics until the arrival of the silicon chip and the commoditization of CPUs. For example: at the end of the 60’s you can find a bunch of clever people working for NASA (like Andrew Viterbi whose “Viterbi algorithm” is still widely used today to decode digital signals), building digital telemetry systems for the Space Race. In 1969 there was only one application for sending digital data, and that was communicating between ground stations and spacecraft. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the system that allowed the lunar astronauts to communicate cost millions of dollars to develop. Now the same technology is reduced to a chip, and you will find one inside every TV set-top box, dilligently detecting and correcting errors in the datastream received by your satellite dish or TV aerial. There are millions of these systems in use today.

You never can tell which technologies will be important and which will fail before the decade closes. Since the birth of the micro-computer (as they used to be called in the 70’s) many digital technologies have died, including bubble memories, telex, X.25, DAT (actually just about every form of tape storage). Many more are on the way out, including Fax, analogue modems and teletext. What would be your predictions for the dead technologies of tomorrow?

Image from Auerbach et. al, 1948, “Mercury delay line memory using a pulse rate of several megacycles”

This week I received a sort of “come on back” email from Ovi. Well done, I thought, with an attempt at personalisation, and a call to action to revisit the site, or click on a link to take a survey and provide some feedback. I think companies should do this more, i.e. think about lapsed users and worry about how to retain or re-engage them. 

Nokia find themselves in a difficult position, though, since (a) the Ovi brand is going away and (b) the Symbian platform (which so much of Ovi is geared for) has been cut-loose with Nokia’s radical platformectomy.

On the former: Nokia have decided to rebrand back to “Nokia”, which seems daft since they must have spent a huge sum establishing “Ovi” as a sub-brand to begin with. Apple have apparently taken no wrong step in the evolution of iPhone/AppStore/iTunes/iOS/iPad, and this has made life very tough for competitors like Nokia and BlackBerry, who ruled the roost before the Maloideaen enemy arrived. However, Ovi had gone from a shaky start to a worthwhile appstore and service platform (especially Ovi Maps, which is a killer app). Conspiracy theorists (of whom there are many) imagined the death of the Ovi brand to be related to the agreement with Microsoft over Windows Phone 7. I don’t know, but for sure Nokia are taking a lot of high-risk decisions recently.

[Incidentally, I only stopped visiting Ovi because my Nokia E71 ceased to be my day-to-day phone. It’s a great site, I think].

On the latter: Nokia’s decision to embrace Windows Phone 7 does for Symbian what the movie “127 Hours” did for solo mountaineering. I’ll be interested to see what the combination of Windows Phone 7 and Nokia hardware does, but I do think that to publicly behead Symbian in the way they have done seem to have done damage to confidence in Nokia almost as much as the (fatal) damage to Symbian.

While I was thinking about the momentous changes for Nokia, the news also broke about HP discontinuing WebOS. The Palm Pre seemed like a nice device with its nifty contactless charging stone (extra $) and its nice GUI-over-Linux, but it pretty soon became part of the background noise, and utimately an investment for HP. HP have now decided to dump WebOS, only weeks after releasing their first tablet based on the operating system. It does beg the question of whether there really is a tablet marketplace, or is there just an iPad marketplace? Sparse whispers about HP (TouchPad), BlackBerry (PlayBook) and Dell (Streak) are nothing against the cacophony of outpourings about the iPad. The iPad can command the market with its £400 price tag, where other tablets are finding the absolute limits of price elasticity in trying to sell at the same level.

Thinking back to the OS wars that happened on PCs, the transition from MS-DOS/PC-DOS, brought Windows into competition with IBM’s OS/2, and also a plethora of network operating systems (LAN Manager, NetWare, Banyan etc) competed with each other. There was a big shakeout, and pretty much Microsoft walked away with everything.

Big changes are happening in the phone and tablet OS business and there will be more blood on the carpet before too long. The shakeout for standardisation of mobiles and tablets is starting here.

Some hackers have discovered secruity vulnerabilities in the Sagem-supplied femtocell device that Vodafone supply as part of their “Vodafone Sure Signal” product.  By discovering the admin password and using the console to change settings, they found that they were able to do all manner of interesting things, including capture information from mobiles that came within roaming range, and record audio from calls going through the device.

Now Vodafone have refuted that the device has a problem, and specifically say that they have pushed an update to all the Sure Signal devices to fix the vulnerability.  They also said that the could (or did?  this part doesn’t seem clear) shut out all Sure Signal devices that had not loaded the update.

However, the hackers say now that fundamentally the device is still broken because the way it works is that the secret key from the network is transmitted to the femto, so that the secrecy and encryption is between the mobile and the femto, and not all the way to the core.

This seems a fair point.  The security system in 3G/GSM is reasonably simple-minded and relies on a secret key that is known by (a) the core network and (b) the SIM card in the phone.  In normal operation, the key is used to encode a challenge, and it is only this encoded product that is sent over the air interface and backhaul.  To expose the key theoretically allows exploits where other devices could impersonate your SIM, and therefore get all access to your account, phone number and resources.  With the News of the World “phone-hacking” reaching fever-pitch right at the moment, people are particularly energized about the possibilities of privacy intrusion using mobile technology.

This Fierce Wireless article about femtocells is quite an interesting read, attempting to answer some of the questions about why femtocells have not enjoyed the predicted boom.  In particular, the quote from Håkan Eriksson jumps out:

“All the devices that are generating this data are Wi-Fi enabled, so installing a femto in the home to carry data traffic is going head-to-head with Wi-Fi.”

In fact it’s worse than that.  Data is one issue.  Cellcos have capacity problems in their data networks and do not give good service.  They also want to charge more and more (see news about Verizon re-tariffing data), not surprisingly, because they have to invest heavily to cope with growing demand from devices like the USB 3G modems and tablets that they sell with such alacrity. Using WiFi/broadband in your home will be better and cheaper than 3G data.  That’s a fact.

Voice is an issue too.  VoIP services are increasingly successfully on mobile phones, often using the WiFi built into the handset.  This means that femtocells are competing directly with a box you probably already have in your house, the WiFi broadband router.   The cellcos want to sell you this additional box, possibly charge a monthly fee, and then all calls will be according to the normal mobile tariffs, international penalties and so on.  VoIP may have a monthly fee (although many services don’t), but typically give you international charges that are extremely low compared to conventional mobile.  For a number of years, I’ve been using VoIP over WiFi in the house using Truphone, which allows me the freedom to roam around the house and garden, and still get low international rates.

Femtocells have been marketed at customers that are relatively rich (they don’t mind the extra charges associated with the equipment) and relatively desperate (because cellular does not work well at their location).  This is not a mass market, and so equipment prices will never get to a point where they can compete head-to-head with commodity WiFi boxes.

If femtos are to be successful then they need to be (a) financially appealing to customers and (b) offer unique functionality or services.  While they hit neither of these points they will continue to sit on the shelves being an inventory problem for cellcos and manufacturers.

The second AdhearsionConf will be held in San Francisco on the weekend of October 8-9, 2011.

Ben Klang, Ben Langfeld and Jason Goecke, the team behind Adhearsion, will all be on hand for two days of talks, knowledge sharing and even some pair programming on all things Ruby and Telephony.

For tickets (free) and call for speakers, see:

http://adhearsionconf2011.eventbrite.com/

IPv6 has become a hot topic the last few months, thanks to the dramatically reduced number of IPv4 addresses available from the authorities (IANA and the RIRs).  Over the last few years a whole plethora of transition mechanisms have been invented to try to ease us into the world of IPv6.  Currently, mechanisms enjoying popularity are Dual-Stack Lite (“DS-Lite”), 6RD (“rapid deployment”) and NAT64.  DS-Lite tunnels IPv4 over an IPv6 backbone; 6RD is somewhat the opposite, tunnelling IPv6 over a legacy IPv4 backbone.  NAT64 allows clients to be native IPv6, but then a magic box in the network converts to IPv4 to support access to v4-only services. To work, NAT64 also has to intercept DNS requests and dynamically create IPv6-model “AAAA” records for IPv4 services that actually only have “A” records.

The problem with transition methods, is that you don’t get to save many IPv4 addresses.  At some point in the network you still need a load of IPv4 addreses.  In the case of 6RD and NAT64, you certainly have some kind of large “carrier-grade” router that will be running a lot of sessions.  Of course not all sessions need to have a unique IP address, since you can do tricky stuff with port mapping and giant NATs, but this is all complexity, and will rely on protocols like NAT PMP to make sure that clients can create mappings that allow the higher-layer protocols (e.g. SIP) to work correctly.  Making bigger and bigger NATs (or NATs behind NATs) looks to be the future for some time to come.

Cloud computing could be a saviour in terms of moving to native IPv6: since so much of work we do now is inside a web browser, this is a relatively painless way of making the switch.  Modern browsers already support IPv6, as do modern operating systems.  If the services involved also support v6, then anything you might do “from the cloud” is ready to go native IPv6, for example:

• Google Docs
• Picture sharing and messaging (Flickr, Twitter)
• TV & Film (iPlayer, Lovefilm – Flash player is popular and supports IPv6)
• Video production (e.g. Animoto)

A couple of other areas that could push ahead with v6 would be mobile and VoIP.  Mobile because (a) 3GPP specs already embrace native IPv6 working and (b) the mobile handsets get replaced in an 18 month cycle, so a rollout is relatively fast.   For VoIP, the SIP protocol already has compatibility with IPv6.  The sticky part is replacing IP phones (or softphone software) that currently are missing the functionality.  Low-cost domestic hardware (like home broadband routers) has been some of the slowest responding to the challenge of IPv6, although occasional success stories exist, like the French company Free, that modified their routers to support 6RD, achieving a rapid rollout. 

Operators seem resigned to running some kind of transition strategy over a long period, more or less thinking about “native” IPv6 only in terms of new services.  For example, enthusiasts for sensor networks (like smart meters for utility companies) talk about using IPv6 to communicate with their devices. 

The effort to go all IPv6 doesn’t seem unattainable, though: if we can get browsers working natively, plus VoIP and mobile what’s left?  Skype?  Media streamers like Spotify?  We should hit the big targets and let the stragglers sort themselves out.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently on satellite technology, and took up the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to attend a talk at the headquarters of Avanti Communications.  Avanti, if you’ve not heard the name before, is a satellite technology company focused on the opportunity for broadband services via satellites for customers that live in “notspots”, i.e. where broadband via cable or telephone line is not available.

Avanti launched their first satellite last November, HYLAS 1, which today covers Europe.  HYLAS 2 will launch in 2012, covering the Middle East and Africa, and a third satellite is in design.  HYLAS 1 went up on the French Ariane launcher, an impressive multi-stage rocket using solid rocket boosters like the space shuttle.  There’s something very compelling about burning tonnes of hydrazine and powdered aluminium to push a payload up to 7km per second to escape the gravity of the Earth. The HYLAS satellites are geostationary, meaning a relatively high orbit of 35000+ km above the Earth.  In actual fact most services use GEO satellites, which makes this area of space a highly congested and finite resource! 

The Avanti business model is via the channel, in other words service providers package and resell the service to end-users, enabling combination services (like fail-over to satellite) to be created.  The basic broadband service is 500kbs(down)/128kbs(up), going up to a max of 8Mbps/2Mbps.  You can expect the latter to be pretty expensive, since the more resources you use for download, the less they have available to sell to other users.

It’s a niche product for sure, but there is a market for “broadband for the disenfranchised”, and this is the first company that’s focused their satellite services on this need.

The story of the iPhone and how it tracks where you are (in the consolidated.db file) has energized the blogosphere and, like most things iPhone, the general media.  It’s even caused comment in the upper echelons of politics; not an area where you typically find much understanding of technology.  This is the iPhone effect; you can’t imagine any other kind of phone where (a) anyone would even notice or (b) bother to comment.

The big puzzle for me is why the tracker doesn’t work very well.  I have an iPhone (although it’s not my only phone) that I have used around the world for 18 months, so I was interested to run the software that would reveal my whereabouts.  But the information didn’t make sense.  For sure some of the information was there: a lot of activity around London; a trip I recently made to Somerset in the West.  There was no record of trips that I’d made to the North.  Nothing outside the UK at all.

More worrying are the wrong reports.  It had several locations in West Oxford and Witney; places I haven’t been to for 15-20 years.  Lines of dots travelling down the South Coast, as though tracking a regular route I would follow there.  Except that I don’t.

In a radio report I heard a commentator say that divorce lawyers would probably be keen to get their hands on the data from iPhones in order to improve the case for infidelity.  Except: what if this information is wrong?  Will judges and lawyers understand that a device with an integrated GPS chip can imagine strange locations, and store them in a file?  What purpose would that serve? 

Apple, what are you doing there?

UPDATE: Apple have responded that this is not the location of the individual, but rather a database that helps to speed up the location function using a share database of WiFi hotspots, which could be anywhere up to 100 miles away from the user.